Divine Information

Barbour, Peacocke
and Sharpe make use of the idea that God interacts with the world via the
'communication of information.'Such a notion is seen as fertile ground because conservation laws need not be
violated - a perennial problem for accounts of Divine action. It's common to
see the triplet of "matter, energy and information" listed as the
basic units of reality, and we often think of information as somehow
disconnected from the other two and not subject to the same laws. However, it
seems to me that information is always
and only realised in physical states. When found in such a triplet, I
believe information is a synonym for the pattern, organization, or structure of
matter/energy. Certainly it deserves to be elevated up with the other two, but
the same laws bind all three. As I understand it, in order
for God to "input information", matter/energy must be reorganized -
by definition. It has been suggested that since God is omnipresent, no
energy is required for such communication,, but I don't see how this helps. Sharpe sees nonlocality as a means to impart the information without
disrupting conservation,but the universe still needs to found in a state that is different from what we
had expected, if we are to then claim that God was objectively
effective temporally.

I should say that both Peacocke
and Barbour are careful to state that information is only ever realised in
physical states during coding, transmission, and decoding, and that it should
not be seen "in purely static terms, as if the message where the pattern
itself."Peacocke adds; "No information flows without
some exchange of energy and/or matter."I agree. If this is acknowledged, I don't think it is entirely fair to present
the 'communication of information' route for Divine action as uniquely immune
to interventionism critiques.

We sometimes use the word 'information' to
mean quite different things. Sometimes we mean organization or structure - this
is always physically instantiated. Sometimes we mean the input to an
information-processing system. This input can vary from an unambiguously rich
and clear signal, to pure noise. Once again, this input is physically
instantiated. Finally, we sometimes mean an abstract concept as in 'the BRCA1
gene'. In this case we recognise that information as structure can be
generalized and given a symbolic representation. Information in this last sense
is 'multiply realisable', as is the case for computer languages and human
languages to some extent. When discussing information, its very helpful to
specify in what sense we are using the term.